Debian Weekly News - June 3rd, 2003

Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. Petter Reinholdtsen announced a
new Skolelinux CD image a while ago that fixes many bugs and uses the debian-installer
already. Mario Lang urgently needs help
fixing bugs in the speakup kernel packages, otherwise the package has to be
abandoned.

Discussion about Debian on the Mac. This Slashdot posting complains about the difficulty of installing Debian on an iBook
and says: "Knoppix has certainly made it easier to put Debian on x86
machines, but does such a thing exist for Macs?" In the discussion, some
readers argued that installing Debian is not that difficult (possibly even
easier on a Mac) and that package management is more important, given that
you only want to install once. Others mentioned Gentoo's live CD for PowerPC.

Flaming with Jamie Zawinski. LiveJournal contains a report by Jamie
Zawinski, the author of the xscreensaver program, in
which he complains about Branden Robinson being a
"gigantic flaming dick". However, it is not clear to us why Jamie considered the
answer to be a flame. Branden was demonstratively objective in his reply.
Jamie was confused by a string in the changelog of an unofficial Debian
package of XFree86, that he found on the Internet, which contained the name of
his program.

Debian Menu System Development. Bill Allombert announced that the menu system is actively maintained again. Bill and
Morten Brix Pedersen fixed more than 80 bugs in the package and created a project in Alioth. The
package also supports
internationalisation. He also mentions
that icons are not required anymore to only use 24 colors documented in the menu
package.

Quantian Scientific Computing Environment. Dirk
Eddelbüttel announcedQuantian, a
re-mastered version of Knoppix. Quantian differs from
Knoppix by adding a set of programs of interest to applied or theoretical
workers in quantitative or data-driven fields. It still retains all of
Knoppix' impressive features in terms of automatic configuration of virtually all
available hardware features. If there is sufficient interest, this project
may become a Debian subproject.

Improved Indian Support for Debian. Jaldhar Vyas wondered if
there is any interest in a sub-project for increasing the support for Indian
languages within Debian. Both GNOME and KDE contain viable support already.
His goals would be to package Indian support software or write it as
necessary, help with i18n and l10n for existing software and advocate the use
of Debian in the Indian community.

Distributing Sound Files. Roberto Gordo Saez wondered if
he is permitted to use the sounds of a package that is distributed
considerably free in a different project. After looking at the chromium game he found out that
it contains third party sound files, which may originally be distributed under
a different license.

Knoppix CD for Machine Clusters. Slashdot reported about
an effort by Wim Vandersmissen who created ClusterKnoppix. He added support
for openMosix to a regular Knoppix image. The new CD features the
openMosix terminal server, openMosix autodiscovery, and clustermanagement
tools such as openMosix userland.

Debian on Power4 Highend Server. Florian Weps reported
about the opportunity he had to test an IBM p630 for a
few weeks. After the AIX tests were finished, he and his colleagues decided to
install
Debian GNU/Linux on one partition of this machine. They benefitted a lot from
the howto by Rolf Brudeseth covering the Debian network installation on IBM
RS/6000 machines.

Conferences in Austria and Brazil. The Debian project announced that it has been invited to
participate in two conferences that are taking place from June 5th to 7th. At
the LinuxWochen in Vienna,
Austria, Debian will be present with a booth staffed by Gerfried Fuchs who
will also give a talk about Debian and organize a keysigning party. At the International Free Software
Convention in Porto Alegre, Brazil, almost all Brazilian Debian Developers
will meet while Bdale Garbee and Wichert Akkerman will give talks.

Debian featured in HP Whitepaper. In a whitepaper from HP that covers Open Source for web services development
Debian is prominently mentioned. The document emphasises its
vendor-neutralness, the strict open-source-only policy, its vigorous quality
program, that avoids the types of issues that have recently plagued certain
commercial distributions, and more. Finally, Debian has a very easy to use
interface for installing and updating software packages.

Managing Package Source with Subversion? Marcelo Magellon
wondered
if and how to maintain the source of Debian packages with Subversion. Most
notably, he's interested in a way to convert an existing CVS repository to
Subversion. Joey Hess answered that he uses a set of handmade scripts for
maintenance and reported
about his experiences with Subversion.

Compiling 64bit Sparc Kernel. Martin Pitt would like to
compile a late 2.5 kernel for sparc64 which runs a 64bit kernel but a 32bit
userland. Therefore he needs a cross-compiler and egcs64 seems
to old for him. Ben Collins explained
that it will build the kernel, and after a bug is fixed the kernel will even
run. He also mentioned that gcc-3.3 will compile 64bit kernels, but they do
not boot.

New Tags for the Bug Tracking System. Colin Watson announced
two new tags for the Bug Tracking System. The tag
lfs refers to bugs about large
file support and ipv6 refer to
bugs with support for IPv6. Guido Günther added that
if these things get tags it would make a lot of sense to add architecture tags
as well in order to classify problems on certain architectures. James Troup
objected, though.

Invariant Sections in Documentation. Richard Stallman
started a discussion that again covers problems inherited by the GNU Free Documentation License
(GFDL) if a document includes invariant sections which renders the document
non-free according to Debian's interpretation. It seems that the GFDL is a
dangerous license which does not always imply free documentation.

Embedded Debian Package Management. Bruno Randolf would
like to use the Debian package management system for an embedded
distribution on a MIPS platform. Therefore he has investigated several
projects and found out that there seems to be quite a lot approaches and ideas,
but only little coordination. Wookey also mentioned
the mini
policy for cross-compiling related packages.

GNU Emacs Manual considered non-free. Jérôme Marant reported
that the GNU Emacs Manual will have to be moved to non-free, due to invariant sections
and the use of the GNU FDL. Invariant sections don't allow modifications
which are required by the Debian Free Software Guidelines. This is very unfortunate, especially
since it affects documentation from the Free
Software Foundation.

OpenOffice.org 1.1beta Debian Packages. The Debian
OpenOffice.org team proudly announced the availability of preliminary packages of OpenOffice.org 1.1
beta. They are downloadable from the debian-openoffice mirrors, in
section 'unstable'. These packages are not yet polished with all features
from the 1.0.x packages, but the majority of the functionality is in
place.

Software Patents Meetings. Wookey forwarded an announcement for a public meeting taking place on June
5th in Cambridge. There is another meeting set up in Strasbourg
by the FFII on June 7th where developers
will be able to talk to politicians. The EU software and gene patent debates
have shown a frightening willingness of Europe's legislators to ignore all
informed discussions, including EU-sponsored studies, and to restrict the
creative freedom of its citizens without a twinkling of the eye.

Debian Day at LinuxTag 2003. There will be a one day conference
dedicated to Debian people at this years' LinuxTag in Karlsruhe, targeting
advanced users and developers. It will take place on Friday, July 11th, and
last for the entire day. The project is still looking for speakers and
topics. If you would like to give a talk at this Debian conference, please
get in touch with Martin Schulze
immediately.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 6 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 189 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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